Saipan Workers Describe Slavery of SweatshopsThe Abramoff corruption and its reach deep into the government has been horribly unreported by the mainstream media; almost no one knows about it (liberal media? please.) and the most outrageous aspect of this scandal is how Abramoff and Tom DeLay conspired to continue slavery and forced abortions in the American Northern Marianas Islands (details).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff_CNMI_scandal They say American Dream turned into nightmareFriday, January 22, 1999
MORE BUSINESS(01-22) 04:00 PST Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands -- The Chinese garment worker sat stiffly in her lawyer's office, staring at the floor. Her carefully manicured hands were clenched in her lap, red nails digging deeply into calloused palms. She was in America and in a protected place. But she was scared stiff. The woman is one of dozens of anonymous plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against some of the world's biggest clothing labels and their local contract manufacturers. The suit, filed last week in Saipan, California and federal courts, accuses the firms of exploiting her and thousands of other indentured foreign workers in sweatshop conditions on U.S. soil. When the garment worker came to Saipan in 1997 from her home province of Jilin, in northern China, she expected life in America to be different. But in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the western Pacific, she in many ways found less freedom than she had back home. She was forced to work long hours of unpaid overtime in order to meet production quotas. Her supervisor yelled constantly and beat the workers ``whenever he felt like it,'' she said. He also forced her and others to ``lend'' him money that was never repaid. In the company dormitory where 120 workers lived, eight to a room, conditions were primitive: Food was unsanitary, and there were a total of three working toilets and five showers. ``They didn't respect us, and they made me feel like I wasn't a human being,'' the woman said. NO WAY OUTAs she worked 12- to 16-hour days stitching clothes for The Gap and other major clothing labels, she was trapped in an insidious system that gives the islands' employers near-total control over their 40,000 foreign contract workers. If they are fired for any reason, they are almost immediately deported to their home countries, where most face heavy debts to the corrupt government officials who gave them the jobs.Late last year, the woman rebelled and filed a complaint with the islands' labor office. ``My supervisor came to me and said, `You have a choice: Either you withdraw the complaint, or you get sent back to China.' I didn't know what to do, so he fired me,'' she recalled. Now she wanders Saipan's 10- mile-long urban and industrial zone, looking for another job in the booming garment industry. But she worries that if the manufacturers find out that she is a plaintiff in last week's lawsuit, she will be blacklisted -- or deported immediately to China, where she still owes $5,000. ``What will I tell my family?'' the woman asked, gazing reproachingly at her lawyer. ``What will happen to us?'' Her fingernails dug deeper into her hands as she spoke. None of the plaintiffs who have given depositions in the case will reveal their names or those of their employers, because some are still working and others are looking for work. When a visiting reporter asked the woman whether she would recommend to her younger sisters that they come to Saipan, she was silent for a long moment, her hands twisting violently. ``I'd tell them, `Stay where you are, don't, don't ever --' '' Her voice caught, and she stopped. Her body seemed to collapse upon itself. She jumped up and rushed from the room, sobbing. The Northern Marianas' mix of tough working conditions, control and fear has engendered a struggle in Congress, where the Republican leadership is blocking attempts by Democratic lawmakers and the Clinton administration to eliminate the islands' longtime exemption from federal immigration, customs and minimum-wage laws. The controversy illustrates how multinational corporations have spurred -- and become dependent on -- the large-scale flow of migrant labor across international borders. With this flow increasingly dominated by organized crime and corrupt governments, corporations sometimes find themselves complicit in a complicated web of abuses committed by their subcontractors, human-rights groups say. In the Northern Marianas, local government officials and clothing industry officials insist that they are not responsible for those abuses. ``I don't know about the payments in China or what goes on there,'' said Richard Pierce, executive director of the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association. ``All we know is that while there may have been some problems here in the past, we've worked very hard to clean them up, and any federal takeover would simply make matters worse.'' Amid the growing controversy, the industry has tried to put its best foot forward. This week, Saipan's largest garment manufacturer, Tan Holdings Corp., showed reporters around its factories and employee bunkhouses. Conditions were clean and orderly -- although some facilities appeared to have been scrubbed especially for the occasion. The company, still nervous about publicity, did not allow photographs. Three subsidiaries owned by the company's owner, Hong Kong- based shipping and gambling tycoon Willie Tan, are defendants in last week's lawsuit. Some impartial observers dispute whether conditions are as bad as the plaintiffs allege. These observers say that in the past year, the garment industry has reacted to the accusations by fixing the worst problems. $2.1 MILLION OWED IN OVERTIME But the U.S. Labor Department said Wednesday that it had been forced to intercede last year after five island employers had refused to pay more than $2.1 million in overtime pay owed to 1,315 workers. In a statement, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman said: ``We must stop the exploitation of workers on these islands. We will continue to hold employers accountable and will work to get U.S. minimum wage standards . . . extended to the Northern Marianas.'' (The commonwealth's minimum wage is $3.05 an hour.) ``The real issue is not whether the factories are total sweatshops or just partially so,'' said one U.S. official who took part this week in talks with the island's government over the controversy. ``In fact, they've probably improved some. What's more important is that none of these abuses are permitted under U.S. law, and the Northern Marianas shouldn't be able to pick and choose between the laws of the land just to benefit a few people.'' The legal arguments, however, pale beside the overwhelming daily reality of an economy totally dependent on an imported proletariat. Of the Northern Marianas' 27,000 U.S. citizens, most active workers are government employees, while the private sector is dominated by 40,000 workers from China, the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh and other Asian nations. The islands' press reflects the same social division. The two daily newspapers -- one of which is owned by Tan -- are staffed exclusively by Filipinos on one-year, renewable contracts. Like the garment workers, hotel workers, housekeepers and myriad other foreigners, these imported journalists must practice self-censorship for fear of being deported. An estimated 10,000 foreigners are in Saipan illegally after overstaying their work permits. Among them are hundreds of Bangladeshis who have been marooned after being cheated by labor contractors. A typical example is M.A.H. Durbar, who came in 1997 with 21 others who each paid $5,000 for jobs as security guards in Saipan -- a huge amount of money in Bangladesh, where the annual per-capita income is about $250. Durbar, 26, was told by the labor contractor that he was going to Saipan U.S.A., America, the land of the free -- located only a train ride away from Los Angeles. A fiasco awaited the newcomers. Although the Northern Marianas government granted him a work permit, the jobs turned out to be nonexistent -- a collaborative scam mounted by the Bangladeshi contractors and an unscrupulous Saipan security firm, Benavente Security. Although a Northern Marianas court last July ordered Benavente to pay the Bangladeshis $104,684, the local government has been unable -- or unwilling, or perhaps too incompetent -- to collect. STRANDED AND DESTITUTE``I sold my house and I borrowed to get this opportunity to come to America,'' Durbar said as he sat cross-legged on the floor of the small house he shares with 16 other destitute Bangladeshis.``Now I must go door to door, begging for work. I can't send money home to my family. They think I'm a liar, that because I'm in America, I must be making good money and spending it all at nightclubs, doing things with girls, rather than helping them pay what we owe.'' ``Now I know that the American flag doesn't mean much,'' he added. ``In World War II, thousands of American soldiers died to put the flag in these islands. But I ask, what for? Where is justice? It's now the responsibility of the Americans to restore the dignity of that flag.'' This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle |
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/01/22/MN49806.DTL&ao=all#ixzz1lkP4C6Ly
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